PlaySF - Children Of Starflight.So what did make the game great? What must we absolutely keep? The first and most obvious is that it needs to be a BIG universe out there. Somewhat less obvious, but almost as important, is that it has to be lonely. I can think of some ways that cooperative multiplayer might work, but the core game experience needs to see the player alone in a vast, dangerous universe with only his ship and crew to rely on. Third, and this one is hard in today’s gaming climate, handholding must be kept to a minimum. Maybe you give the player a brief tutorial mission or two, but then all kinds of direct intervention by the game to tell the player where to go must stop. You feed the player clues through a dozen or two different ways, sure; but a game like this succeeds on the player’s sense of discovery and achievement as he begins to connect the dots in his mind. For modernity’s sake I would advocate for systems that allow the player to keep all kinds of notes in a sophisticated journal (for example, with direct links to the starmap), but let the player make those entries himself.

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